|
''Ethnologue: Languages of the World'' is a web-based publication that contains statistics for 7,469 languages and dialects in its 18th edition, which was released in 2015. Of these, 7,102 are listed as living and 367 are listed as extinct〔(''Ethnologue'', 18th edition website )〕 Up until the 16th edition in 2009, the publication was a printed volume. ''Ethnologue'' provides information on the number of speakers, location, dialects, linguistic affiliations, availability of the Bible in each language and dialect described, and an estimate of language viability using the Expanded Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (EGIDS). The publication is well respected and widely used by linguists. ==Overview== ''Ethnologue'' is published by SIL International (formerly known as the Summer Institute of Linguistics), a Christian linguistic service organization based in Dallas, Texas. The organization studies numerous minority languages in order to facilitate language development and work with the speakers of such language communities in translating portions of the Bible into their language.〔 What counts as a language depends upon socio-linguistic evaluation; as the preface to ''Ethnologue'' says, "Not all scholars share the same set of criteria for what constitutes a 'language' and what features define a 'dialect'." ''Ethnologue'' follows general linguistic criteria, which are based primarily on mutual intelligibility.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Scope of denotation for language identifiers )〕 Shared language intelligibility features are complex, and usually include etymological and grammatical evidence that is agreed upon by experts. In addition to choosing a primary name for a language, ''Ethnologue'' gives some of the names that its speakers, governments, foreigners and neighbors use for it, and also describes how the language has been named and referenced historically, regardless of whichever designation is considered official, politically correct or offensive. In 1984, ''Ethnologue'' released a three-letter coding system, called a "SIL code", to identify each language that it described. This set of codes significantly exceeded the scope of previous standards, e.g. ISO 639-1. The 14th edition, published in 2000, included 7,148 language codes, which generally did not match the ISO 639-2 codes. In 2002, ''Ethnologue'' was asked to work with the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) to integrate its codes into a draft international standard. The 15th edition of ''Ethnologue'' was the first edition to use this standard, called ISO 639-3, and since then ''Ethnologue'' relies on this standard to determine what is a language. However, there is not complete concordance between ISO and ''Ethnologue''. For example, ISO considers Akan to be a macrolanguage consisting of two distinct languages, Twi and Fante, whereas ''Ethnologue'' considers Twi and Fante to be dialects of a single language (Akan). With the 17th edition, ''Ethnologue'' introduced a numerical code for language status using a framework called EGIDS (Extended Graded Inter-generational Disruption Scale), an elaboration of Fishman’s GIDS (Graded Inter-generational Disruption Scale), which ranks a language from 0 for an international language to 10 for an extinct language, i.e. a language with which no-one retains a sense of ethnic identity. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Ethnologue」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|